Paracas & the Pisco Valley — Skulls, the Candelabro & the Band of Holes

The Mystery

Paracas & the Pisco Valley — Skulls, the Candelabro & the Band of Holes

See the elongated skulls of Paracas and the real story behind the 'alien' legend, sail past El Candelabro, stand on the desert necropolis where the skulls were dug from the sand, and puzzle over the Band of Holes and the painted Inca walls of Tambo Colorado. Two days, no flights — the south coast's mysteries, told straight.

In 1927, the archaeologist Julio C. Tello lifted 429 mummy bundles and hundreds of elongated skulls out of the desert at Paracas — bodies wrapped in some of the finest textiles the ancient world ever made. The skulls are why many people come: swept back into shapes that don't look quite human, they've become the world's most famous 'are they alien?' artefacts. The real story is just as striking — infants' skulls bound between boards to signal elite status, a permanent crown in a rigidly ranked society — and we tell it straight, alongside the 'unknown DNA' legend the skulls attract, clearly labelled as the unproven claim it is.

This is a flight-free, two-day road trip down Peru's south coast — no small planes, no rush, just the strangeness of the desert at ground level. You'll sail the wildlife-packed Ballestas Islands and pass El Candelabro — a 180-metre figure carved into a coastal cliff — then walk the Paracas National Reserve, where red-gold cliffs and dark-red sand meet a turquoise Pacific.

No one agrees what El Candelabro is, or who made it. One camp ties it to the people who drew the Nazca Lines some two thousand years ago — though a giant candelabrum is an odd thing for them to have drawn, which leads others to read the shape not as a chandelier at all but as a plant: perhaps the hallucinogenic San Pedro cactus long used by Andean shamans. Stranger still, no Spanish chronicle records a figure this enormous and this plainly visible from the sea — an absence that feeds a rival theory that it is far more recent: a Masonic emblem left by the independence armies of San Martín and Bolívar, both Freemasons, who campaigned along this very coast against the Spanish crown. We lay the theories side by side and let you weigh them.

The second day turns from the sea to the desert's older puzzles. It opens at the Wari Kayan necropolis on Cerro Colorado — the wind-scoured hillside where Tello lifted the mummy bundles and the elongated skulls out of the sand; this is where they came from. Then up the Pisco valley to the Band of Holes: thousands of pits marching over a mountainside in ordered rows for nearly a kilometre — no one is sure who dug them, or why: storehouses, a tax ledger, a boundary line? And finally Tambo Colorado, the best-preserved Inca adobe fort on the coast, its trapezoidal niches still carrying their original red, white and yellow paint. The mysteries are real; so is the honesty. (The Nazca Lines overflight is deliberately saved for our separate three-day trip.)